By the time we’d known each other half an hour, we were talking about which song we’d want playing in the background while we committed suicide.
It wasn’t as out of the blue as I just made it sound. What got us on the subject was this scene in a German movie I’d seen recently about a couple who make snuff films out of the suicides of consenting subjects. Two of said subjects were young women – teenage-looking, early twenties at the absolute limit – who, for reasons we are not privy to, kill themselves together with pills and vodka. Of all the things I was meant to be upset about in this movie, I found myself particularly upset by the music they’d picked to play them out of the world of the living: some listless late-90s jangly sub-Mazzy Star dryjack, played on a tinny boom box that turned those trendy jangles all crunchy and abrasive. The viewer isn’t informed which of the girls was in charge of the music, but if I were the other one I would have put a pin in the whole thing and found something decent. I mean Christ, you only get one shot at this. Take a bit of care with it.
Fine, she said, so what would you pick instead.
This is a more involved question than would strike you at first glance. It presupposes a couple of things, above all that you’re killing yourself in some way that leaves you enough time to listen to something; “bleeding out in the bathtub” was the example she used. And I never really saw myself punching my ticket in that way. Didn’t fit my personality. Part of that was, no doubt, related to the cultural gender dynamics of suicide. Slitting your wrists in the tub is sort of your classic female suicide, a lengthy, languid affair that you need to set the mood for, in contrast to a quick and decisive manly suicide like a gun or hanging. (There was a sex and/or masturbation analogy lurking in there, which I decided not to bring up because I was fucking amazed the drift of this conversation wasn’t weirding her out yet and I didn’t want to push my luck. She may have noticed that I restrained myself from saying something but she didn’t press the issue.)
She said she would dispute that. We both knew that suicide was underreported in light of the its taboo nature – underreported by quite a bit, in her opinion. Specifically, she believed that tons of overdoses among men that get ruled accidental actually aren’t. There was kid in her high school, she said, a senior who had already been to detox once, found dead of a benzo overdose, and it came out a couple years later that his dad had found a suicide note with him but hidden it. Imagine how often that probably happens, she said.
I made her go first and it didn’t surprise me at all that she an answer on hand. “Tomorrow Never Knows”. I was already pretty attracted to her at this point so I kept to myself how basic I found that answer. Her reasoning surprised me, though; she didn’t mention the lyrics at all. “It’s the drums, mainly. I’ve always loved the drums on that song. I don’t know enough about audio production to put my finger on it, but it’s sort of like, echoey and strange, there’s almost kind of like a phase effect on it, it wooshes and sloshes around, and I dunno. The beat is just super hypnotic and it’s always been able to like, calm me down, and I think I’d need that, in that situation. Just calm down and push myself through it.”
It was my turn now. I paused a moment. I paused too long for her, and she chided me for it. She said I had something in mind already, it was my honest answer, and I should just spit it out instead of trying to think of something cooler to try to impress her. I didn’t know that I accepted that premise. I also thought she was being a bit of a hypocrite – I doubted she’d just come up with her answer off the cuff, that was thought over for sure. But was she was right, I did have something in mind. So I said fuck it and told it to her. It was “Heaven” by Robyn Hitchcock. But not the album version. The one I had in mind was a live version from some reissue. I ran across it by pure accident when my friend burned me a CD ages ago. It was an acoustic reworking of the version everybody knows, and it had a slower tempo, an interestingly lopsided arpeggio behind it, some harmonies that weren’t there before. Most importantly, there was a spoken-word intro where Robyn went off on this whole fantastical tangent, making “Heaven” out to be a folk song that miners used to sing while they prayed at a floating cathedral out in the wilderness.
She asked why I picked it and I didn’t really have an articulate reason. It was just a beautiful song, but not without a sense of the sardonic, and the intro added a surreal touch, perfect for tipping me off into what dreams may come.
I didn’t go home with her that night, but I did get her number. I got home with a maggot on my brain. I queued up “Tomorrow Never Knows” on a Bose speaker and filled up the bathtub. Steaming hot. I grabbed a filet knife from the kitchen and I gave myself a quick stab in the thigh with it – on the outer edge so as to miss the femoral, I wasn’t doing it for real. I climbed into the tub and winced as the bloody part of my leg seared like a section of hot wire. I’d made the wound probably deeper than it needed to be, and definitely made the water hotter than it needed to be. Moreover I was dumb and left the shampoo bottle open in the bottom of the tub while it was filling, and boy did that shit sting. No matter. All the better.
I lay there, lazily bleeding into the water until there was enough in the tub that I could pretend I was dying, dried off my hand on the hanging towel, reached over to the counter and hit play, and I sat there, following the billows of steam off the bathwater with my eyes, envisioning the life slowly oozing out of me drop by drop. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t see what she meant. That drum part was fucking meant to be played in a bathroom you were dying in. That odd double tom hit like a faltering heartbeat. Ringo was obviously plugged deeper into the mysteries of the beyond than he was ever given credit for. The acoustics were perfect. The drums bounced off the tile and mingled with the sound of the bloody water sloshing around when I shifted in the tub. It was like that whooshing beat reached into my head and turned the volume down on everything else. The heat on my face and the throb in my leg all sank down to the bottom of the bathtub. I surrendered fully to the fantasy with ease, and blackness gathered at the edge of my vision as I imagined it would.
The next thing I knew I was sitting in a silent bathroom, with my neck stiff and my limbs goosebumped from the completely cold water. I hauled my heavy body out of the tub and started drying, rubbing hard to warm my body back up, pausing to blot my leg wound gingerly. I debated whether to tell her what I found out. I decided that was third date material.
Tyler Peterson is a writer from the cold, mean streets of Iowa. His short fiction has appeared in Misery Tourism, SCAB, Expat Press, and Body Fluids. He Xes as @type___e
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